


What's My Name

by MiniNephthys



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 15:51:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8452387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNephthys/pseuds/MiniNephthys
Summary: Three children decide on their own names.





	

They hate their name.

‘Caitlin’. It’s so feminine, so demure. ‘Caitlin’ should wear cute dresses, and ‘Caitlin’ should laugh off boys pulling her hair, and ‘Caitlin’ should be polite around adults and never ever ever get in their way.

They looked it up in a book of name meanings and found its meaning: ‘purity’. That just made them hate it even more. How dare anyone, even - especially their parents tell them that they had to be pure and perfect. If such a person even exists, they don’t want to be them.

‘Chara’ is a project grown over a few months of snapping ‘don’t call me that!’ at classmates and getting a ‘well, what should I call you instead?’ in return. Their one concession to their birth name is the first syllable, and even that is spelled differently. Nonintuitively. Someone has to remember how to spell it, how to say it: they have to remember that they’re a person and not just a name in a long list of names, a sad and angry child in a long line of sad children.

Their parents never use it for them, not once.

* * *

He’s not really Asriel anymore, is he?

Even if he was - even if he still remembers what it was like to be Asriel, what it was like to feel things about other people, and even if he wishes more than anything to go back to those times - he can’t keep that name. It’s easier to pretend to be someone completely different, a monster that it just happens no one’s met before.

So, if he can’t be Asriel, he has to be somebody else, with some other name.

He goes through a long list of potential names and discards them all. Names that he thinks sound cool, that are rejected for not sounding like him. Names that look pretty, that are rejected for being hard to remember. Names that he’s heard before, that are rejected for belonging to someone else already.

In the end, he trips over his tongue once when introducing himself as ‘just a flowey - I mean a flower’, and that sticks with him. It’s simple, descriptive, easy to remember. It’s not exactly the prettiest or coolest name, but he’s not the prettiest or coolest monster.

Dad would’ve liked the name, he knows. It doesn’t make him feel anything.

* * *

They don’t completely hate their name. It’s not a bad name: it’s just not theirs.

They shrink a little more every time they hear ‘Rebecca.’ It’s on all the foster home’s papers, and it would take too long to explain to every family they go through that they don’t like being called that, so they mostly just keep it to themselves.

Once, a younger child who’d heard about their dislike for the name called them ‘Rivsk’. That was nice, but still a little too close, so after some more brainstorming, they came up with ‘Frisk’. And that stayed with them, to be given to a few treasured other children for what time they had as friends before they were inevitably separated.

It’s not really a name, they know. They wouldn’t find it in any book of baby names.

But it’s theirs, and that’s more important.


End file.
